Interesting. I feel like my favorite albums this year are all pretty indie, but, aside from the Neko Case and YLT, not a one of them made anybody's lists. (In case you're wondering, and I'm sure you are: Kurt Vile, Toro Y Moi, The Dot Wiggin Band, Grant Hart, Love Language, and Matthew E. White are my 2013…

Agreed, "Sunshine Days" is a pretty nice little stand-alone, and it was kind of a relief to have an episode that was a little lighter, tonally, in between heavier episodes. Also, it had Ben Linus!

The S6 episodes where the Syndicate gets finished off pretty much felt like an end to the mythology, to me. I didn't feel like they were truly out of ideas until the end of S6-beginning of S7 episodes with MulderJesus and the Mimi Rogers Alien Holocaust.

Oh, the Pizza Man scene. Most of the time, when The X-Files makes me feel like throwing up, it's because they're showing a guy's flesh falling off, or giant boils exploding in people's faces. But this time, the nausea was won on pure dialogue alone, each line more stomach-cramp-inducing than the last. Congrats,…

Yeah, he just kind of disappears into the night, doesn't he? Maybe he went to go hang out in the nuclear reactor with his buddy the Arizona alien and Gibson Praise. Doesn't Billy resurface at the end of this season or beginning of the next one, though?

Okay, I'm going to start my full-on bitching about the inability of the show to commit to Scully's pregnancy with these episodes. They didn't want to go all "Moonlighting" and ruin the show with these characters getting together and just mooning over each other every week; I get that. But Scully's pregnant. You've…

Nope, he gets the full fancy satin-lined coffin.

Oh, and regarding that shot with Billy Miles in the hospital hallway - the cinematography in Deadalive is at once so gorgeous and so unrealistic. "Welcome to our hospital…sorry the overheads are all out, but we've opened the blinds just a crack so our corridors are lit by the blazing rays of the setting sun. Try not…

This has been bothering me for years. The alien virus would have kept him alive through the embalming process? Not to mention that his eyes and mouth would have been glued shut. …This is one of those things we're supposed to just not think too hard about, right?

Help me out, Philes - I seem to remember reading somewhere that the in vitro flashbacks were supposed to have taken place around season five - does anybody else remember that, or is it just something I made up in my mind to make the in vitro thing less retcon-y and fit in more with the already-established…

Fox Mulder, Marita Covarrubias, Knowle Rohrer…there should be an X-Files Name Generator. Take the name of a wild animal and/or major league sports announcer and combine it with something vaguely Germanic and/or Russian-sounding. Voila! You're a double agent working inside the Pentagon!

Chris Carter insisting that X-Files was not character driven gets the big Edna Krabappel "HA!" from me. He wants to convince himself he's Dick Wolf, churning out the ol' insert-any-lawyer-here procedurals, fine, but the rest of us are not boarding that crazy train with ya, bub. I mean, geez, like the X-Files…

I will say this about the introduction of Reyes - I kind of love the scene out in that field. The way that it's shot. It's so sunny compared to the rest of the episode, it almost seems surreal, like a dream sequence. And it actually looks like western Montana.

Indeed - screaming "nooo!" while dropping to the knees is such a worn-out movie cliché, and yet GA makes it seem like the exactly right thing that Scully would do right then. She's been kicked in the balls so many times at that point, and to be so close to having Mulder back alive and well, only to have the aliens…

Gillian Anderson is just so fucking good in …Happening - especially the interrogation and the scene in the morgue, where she's right on the edge of losing her shit - that, for me, she overrides all the lame Reyes stuff (for the moment, anyway.) But, yeah, I might have graded Per Manum a little higher, too - the body…

Pretty awesome, but this is still my favorite: http://textsfromthexfiles.t…

Great write-up, Todd. (And the mouse-over - I remember thinking "is that his headshot?") It's interesting to think that, if X-Files were current, there might be more of the mythology and less of the stand-alones. Looking back, some of the best MOTWs still managed to incorporate a little sliver of the conspiracy…

Starring Knowle Rohrer as…The Rural Juror.

If memory serves, yes, I think the Unusual Brain Activity thing that happened in Sixth Extinction was due to him being exposed to the alien virus via the black oil back in…Tunguska or Terma, I think? This is off the top of my head, though, so I may be wrong.

Indeed. What's frustrating is, it *almost* fits, what with that "unusual brain activity" stuff happening back in Sixth Extinction (pretty sure that's the episode where the spacecraft etching starts driving him mad.) But then when Doggett shows Scully Mulder's medical records in Within, she says "there's a clear…